Here are the 4 items you should consider when evaluating Wix vs Squarespace:

Wix gives you over 500 professional looking design templates to choose from, from a very broad range of industries such as businesses & services, online store, photography, hospitality, design, portfolio, blog, music, etc. So you can easily find a suitable design that matches what your website is all about.

All of the templates are very professional looking and is pre-populated with suggested design layouts so you can hit the ground running without worrying about how to structure your content layout.

So if you’re not sure how to best design your website, this is a really great feature for you. All you have to do is replace the suggested content with your own or move the content around to create your own unique design.

Note, Wix has an advanced mobile user interface and editor that allows you to customize your own mobile design. This is great if you want your website to appear slightly differently on mobile and tablet screens from the desktop version.

One advanced feature that we really like is Wix allows you to hide content if you don’t want it to be displayed on mobile phones – giving you flexibility over what you want to share with your visitors.

One drawback of Wix’s templates is that once you pick one, you won’t be able to change templates without having to re-create your content again. So even though you can change designs, you can’t transfer your content from one template to another.

The main reason for this is due to the fact that you can literally drag & drop content anywhere on your website (whereas Squarespace is more structured and does not allow you to freely place content anywhere). With such design freedom, the limitation is that you can’t transfer content from template to template. So make sure you pick the best template before you get started!

Even though Squarespace offers you little over 40 design templates and over 20 Cover Page designs (compared to Wix’s 500+ designs), all of them are beautifully designed, and can give your visitors the impression that you spent thousands of dollars to custom design your website.

In contrast to Wix, Squarespace has taken the “quality over quantity” approach in its templates collection. So while you have a lot less to choose from, any Squarespace template you end up using is of very high quality.

The downside compared to Wix’s large collection of templates, is that you have a lower chance of finding the exact design you are looking for.

Similar to Wix, Squarespace offers you designs for businesses, online stores, portfolios, music, restaurants, etc. So you can discover your favorite template design based on its suggestions.

All of Squarespace’s templates are fully mobile responsive. This means that your website will display beautifully across all mobile devices without you having to lift a finger. All your content will automatically adjust to fit within mobile display screens.

The drawback with these templates is that you don’t have any control over how your content will be displayed on mobile devices (Wix gives you this flexibility). But the benefit is that you have less to do and worry about, as your website’s mobile display is automatically taken care of.

With Squarespace, you do have the freedom to change templates, and all your existing content will be automatically transferred into the new template. The benefit is that if you want to overhaul your design (by choosing another template), you just have to select the new design, adjust the layout a little bit, and you’re pretty much done.

2) Ease of Use

Wix is one of the easiest website builders to use in the market today.

It offers you a “pure” drag & drop user interface, so you can literally place any content (such as images, text, buttons, slideshows, social buttons, etc) anywhere on your website, all without having to write a line of code.

As such, you have a lot of creative freedom & control over your design, with very little content placement restrictions.

Where Wix also excels is you can find help buttons everywhere when you are first learning how to use its website builder.

So if you are unsure how a tool works, they have easy-to-understand tutorials right next to the tool, and you won’t have to open a new window to get to its Help Center (more about its support below). This makes building your first website a very pleasant experience.

Squarespace also has elements of drag & drop, but works in blocks where you can add, edit or take sections away from your site. Again, you can create your website without touching a line of code.

However, as mentioned above, its platform is a bit more structured, so while you can drag & drop content around, all the content has to be placed next to each other or stacked on top of one another. So it’s more of a modular building experience where the system automatically “snaps” your content into position.

Whereas with Wix, you can drop your content anywhere on your screen and it will remain there (its platform won’t move the content and snap it into place). So Squarespace’s content placement is a bit limited in this sense.

Overall, Squarespace is still quite easy to use, though it does have a slightly higher learning curve. But once you get the hang of it, it’s a really pleasant website builder to use.

3) Help and Support

Wix offers you customer support through multiple different channels, including phone, email, forum, and a help center.

Its help center is very comprehensive, with written, image and video tutorials. It’s very much self-serve and you will be able to find answers to most of your questions.

Again, Wix conveniently places help buttons in the perfect positions all around your user interface. It’s really for you to click on the buttons and find out more about each tool.

If you need a bit more hand-holding, you can always phone them at any time between 5am – 5pm Monday to Thursday. But if its phone support team is busy at a particular time, you can schedule a support appointment for them to call you back. The benefit to you is that you won’t have to sit around and wait in line (which we all dislike!), and can focus your energy elsewhere.

So it’s a bit like a concierge service and in our view, well worth subscribing to its premium plans (more below).

However, they don’t have a phone support system set up yet, so Wix definitely offers you a bit more personal service from this perspective.

But keep in mind that Squarespace does answer emails very quickly (24 hours, 7 days a week), and does have a live chat function during business days.

4) Pricing Plans

Wix offers you 8 different plans. 5 non-ecommerce: free, Connect Domain $5/month, Combo $11/month, Unlimited $14/month, and VIP $29/month. And 3 ecommerce: Business Basic $20/month, Business Unlimited $25/month, and Business VIP $35/month. The higher the plan, the more tools & services you get.

Note that Wix will display an advertisement on your website if you are using its free or Connect Domain plan. So if you want to brand your website as your own, you should definitely upgrade to the Combo plan or above. Squarespace’s lowest plan for building a full website is $12/month, a little bit higher than Wix’s Combo plan.

One thing you should be aware of is that Wix does have different bandwidth allowance for different plans. Simplistically, think of bandwidth as how much power it takes for Wix to allow your visitors to look around your website. Everything from loading of images, video, text, etc takes up bandwidth.

So if you plan on creating a larger website (with a lot of pages / content), and expect to have a good number of visitors coming to your site, I’d recommend upgrading to Wix’s higher plans.

One other thing to consider when assessing Wix’s plans is its concierge-like support team. What you’re also paying for is its personal support services, which in our view, goes a long way in helping you build your website & having a great experience while doing so.

Note that Squarespace does not have a free plan. They offer you a 14 day free trial period, and you will have to decide whether to upgrade to one of its paid plans or not. If you don’t, you won’t be able to continue using its services. 14 days should give you a sufficient period of time to determine if Squarespace is the right fit for you.

Squarespace does offer you unlimited bandwidth across all its plans, so definitely less restrictive when compared to Wix. You can subscribe to its lowest plan, and don’t have to worry about running out of bandwidth allowance.

Keep in mind that once you sign up to Squarespace’s paid plans, you get access to its 24/7 dedicated support team, with 1 hour email response time & live chat. So you are not only paying for a way to build your website, you are also getting great services / support along the way.

Summary:

Wix:

With over 500 free design templates for you to choose from, Wix has a really broad range templates across many different industries. So if you have a specific look in mind, or you just need some design inspiration, you’ll have a much easier time finding that with Wix. Its “pure” drag & drop builder allows you to place content literally anywhere you want to and gives you precise control over your design.

Wix has a friendlier user interface and a lot lower learning curve compared to Squarespace. This is also supported by its comprehensive help center, and that they place help buttons in very convenient locations throughout your website-building process.

Don’t forget that Wix also offers you phone support, which is fantastic. From a pricing perspective, Wix’s premium plans are very similar to Squarespace’s. Just be aware of the drawback that you can’t change templates without having to rebuild your content.

Squarespace:

Squarespace’s templates are some of the most polished and professional-looking designs amongst website builders. Its attention to design is quite apparent here and if you use its templates well, your website can looking really high-end.

If you build your website with Squarespace, your website will be mobile responsive so it’ll display very well across all mobile devices. Although Squarespace does have a bit of a higher learning curve compared to Wix, once you get a handle on things, it’s pretty easy and pleasant to use. Squarespace also offers you 24/7, one-hour email support, and live chat.

Which One Is More Popular?

Although this is a very vain metric, we feel that you might find it helpful when you choose between Wix or Squarespace: If you look at Google Trends, you will see that Wix is definitely much more widely searched than Squarespace – suggesting that they are better branded and more popular. Wix also has over 3.7 million paying users (according to publicly available data), suggesting that a lot of users are satisfied / happy with Wix’s services.

Since Squarespace is a private company, they only disclosed that they have over 1 million paying customers. So this makes the comparison between actual paying users not as meaningful here. Keep in mind that these are only reference points, and you should really decide after you’ve tried both website builders (both are free to try).

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About Jeremy

Maybe just like you, at first we didn't have a darn clue about how to build a website, nevermind write half a line of code if our life depended on it! We wanted to build a website to start a side business, and felt overwhelmed, confused & scared about how to actually do it, which builder to use, and making wrong decisions. After years of trials & errors using different website builders, we're here to share our experiences with you.

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About Jeremy

Maybe just like you, at first we didn't have a darn clue about how to build a website, nevermind write half a line of code if our life depended on it! We wanted to build a website to start a side business, and felt overwhelmed, confused & scared about how to actually do it, which builder to use, and making wrong decisions. After years of trials & errors using different website builders, we're here to share our experiences with you.

9 Responses to Wix vs Squarespace | 4 Things To Know Before You Start

Thank you for the in-depth review!
I still haven’t decided which one to use, though, since there are pros on each side that I think would work great for me. As you suggested, I will try both before I make my final decision.

I’d like to mention 2 things that might matter to some when making a decision:

1. Price: I am looking at their plans in euros and while the Squarespace one ‘converts’ from 12 dollars into 11 euros, the Wix numbers stay consistent, so 12.5 dollars translates to 12.5 euros.

2. You mention that if you choose the lowest Squarespace plan of 12 dollars, you only get 20 pages, but checking their website it says that with the 12-dollar plan you also get unlimited pages.

Thanks for your comment, we’re glad you found our comparison useful. Thanks for pointing that out, Squarespace’s old pricing structure only allowed for a 20-page website on the $12 plan but they have since made it unlimited. The review has now been updated to reflect this – great spot!

Thanks very much for this review. As I move into a more relaxed retirement I want to get rid of the bells and whistles and just run a travel writer blog while sharing some nature-based scenes from my visits. Squarespace will do this for me.

Thanks for your great Wix / Squarespace comparison article. I found it really helpful in making a decision as to which company I was going to use. Squarespace for me being a designer, has as you mention, a more sophisticated and professional edge to their template designs. Not as many as Wix, but how much choice does one need. I shall definitely pass on your website to others’ searching for a concise review.

You’re right – if a person uses a drag and drop website builder that include hosting services, he/she may have a hard time moving to another website building service. However, Squarespace does allow you to export content into WordPress, so that’s a good builder to consider if you want that flexibility.

But overall, that’s one overall drawback with using code free, drag and drop web builders. They make it really easy and possible for non-technical users to build websites, but there are some limitations to them. With Wix, you can’t export your website content at all. The main reason is that their drag and drop platform is coded / built in a very specific way, that is not necessarily compatible with other platforms.

But the same limitation also goes the other way with more advanced, mainstream builders such as WordPress. If you ever want to leave WordPress, you’ll likely have a hard time migrating it to a completely different platform (such as Joomla, Drupal, or even to drag and drop builders such as Wix or Squarepace). So the limitations also apply to builders that require you to get your own hosting services.

About Us

Maybe just like you, at first we didn’t have a clue about how to build a website, let alone write half a line of code – even if our lives depended on it!

We wanted to build a website for our business, but felt overwhelmed, confused & scared about how to actually do it or which builder to use. We couldn’t afford to make wrong decisions or expensive mistakes, so after years of trials & errors using different website builders, we’re here to share our experiences with you.